Traditionally, people who used cameras for film photography were at least somewhat concerned about composing photos taken with such cameras to be visually pleasing. Once taken, there was little, if anything, people who did not develop their own film could do to improve their photos. Consequently, a photo that was not visually pleasing when taken generally resulted in a developed photo that also was not visually pleasing.
In digital photography, however, a photo that is not visually pleasing when taken may, through photo processing techniques, result in a visually pleasing (e.g., well-composed) photo. For example, a user with a digital camera may take a photo without being concerned generally about the composition of the photograph, such as whether the photo adheres to any of “the rules” of photography, e.g., rule-of-thirds, balancing elements, leading lines, and the like. Instead, the user may simply capture portions of a scene that they want to ensure are included in a final version of the photo. Given the digital photograph and a photo-editing application, a user may then perform a number of tasks to improve the photo, such as cropping the photo, adjusting the contrast of the photo, adjusting the brightness of the photo, adjusting the sharpness of the photo, applying a colored or black-and-white filter to the photo, and so on.
One of the most frequently performed tasks in photograph processing is cropping. Generally, the goal of cropping is to select a sub-region of a given image that is visually more pleasing than the image as a whole, e.g., a sub-region of the image that would be considered well-composed. However, users who are not familiar with “the rules” of photography, knowing when those rules may be broken, and/or who do not have a good “eye” for capturing a scene, may nevertheless crop an image so that the result is still not visually pleasing. Furthermore, manually cropping multiple photos may be time-consuming.